Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying is tongue-in-cheek to be sure. Designed as a storytelling game with no prep and only a few dice, the game is a gentle jab at an aspect of RPGs that has gone by the wayside in recent years; the inventory.
Now, that’s not entirely true. Almost every RPG acknowledges that characters can carry things, keeping them in their pockets or backpacks. Many don’t bother keeping careful track, however, opting for the adventure-game route of hammerspace or bottomless pockets.
Burnout Reaper is a dark and bloody cyberpunk game about the murderous gig economy: rich people need organs, and thanks to the omnipotent forces of supply and demand, your job is to acquire them from people who haven’t finished using them yet. A Grand Guignol style bloodbath relishing in the horrors of late-stage capitalism, Burnout Reaper is a brilliant, if blunt, exploration of Economy.
Each gig you take rewards you with Cyber Crypto, or CC.
Sacrifice is a universal RPG system, though only technically. In practice, Sacrifice is a deconstruction of the entire RPG medium and dramatic storytelling.
There is, in fact, only one simple set of rules: your character can do anything that the narrative has established your character can do. When they want to do something that the narrative hasn’t established they can do, then they roll 2d6. If they roll a 12, then they succeed.
.dungeon is a pretty simplistic RPG in a lot of ways. With a MMORPG dungeon-crawling aesthetic, the game taps into virtual RPG simplicity. You assign dice to your stats and roll the dice any time you want to do something. Roll high enough, and you do. Roll lower, and you don’t. Pretty simple rules-light stuff.
But there is one specific difference: .dungeon’s ludo-narrative taps into the meta-narrative of the game. Put simply, the real world affects the game-world.
Noblesse Goblige is a competitive GMless RPG based in Verdibog, a cosmopolitan goblin city in a swamp. In it, you play as a scion of one of five major goblin clans, each of which has a claim to the title of Gob-Boss after the current Gob-Boss, Lady Stinkworth, died without naming a successor.
Each player plays a character from a different clan, each with the goal of manipulating their way to the top of the successor list, bringing power, prestige, and lots and lots of money to their clan.
Mission Accomplished is an RPG inspired by shows like Archer, The Venture Brothers, and Better Off Ted. It’s a game about being a team of super-spies who save the world on a weekly basis, usually in 30-45 minute increments. You drop into dangerous situations, mix things up, and then get out of there and back to HQ, a job-well-done.
But that’s only half of the game. The second half is the HR meeting, where the complaining, bickering, and blaming happens.
You Awaken In A Strange Place is an RPG.
Juuuust barely.
I mean, take a look at it; there’s barely anything there. The core tenet of the game is that everyone comes to the game unprepared. If you want to play this system, the first thing you have to do build the system itself. I mean, you have to call it a sandbox, don’t you? There’s nothing to railroad. The GM is given five minutes after building the characters to make notes before the game officially starts, like some perverse scholastic speech-and-debate competition.
Darkspace is an RPG, though I’m not sure the game would agree. As far as it’s concerned, it is, quote: “an immersive sci-fi experience. Five players take on the roles of the crew of the Triton, an ill-fated cargo ship alone in dark space. The captain, the doctor, the mercenary, the corpo, the synth — one of you is a murderer. Will you solve the mystery of the Triton before the ship’s life support fails?
Inspired by Annihilation and Roadside Panic, QZ is about the Quarantine Zone; a place where the laws of nature decided to take a holiday and turn the area into a surreal fever dream. The game itself is not a horror game, nor comedy, nor drama; but the QZ can be horrific, funny, and dramatic in turn.
In the instructions on how to use the rulebook, the book clearly states that the game was designed to be played as a sandbox.
Lady Blackbird is, in fact, Chapter one of Tales from the Wild Blue Yonder, three pre-built one-shot adventure modules where you play as pre-made characters, in medias res, with a carefully constructed scenario for you to play through in an attempt to fulfill your character’s goals.
It’s not as locked-down as that makes it sound. For all the pre-building these characters have gone through, there is a lot of flexibility in how the characters are played and how their backstories are revealed.
